Four Factors Converged in the Unleashing of Most of the Crimes

Four factors converged in the unleashing of most of the crimes of passion in La Palma judging by the documentation consulted. First, as we have already pointed out, the behavior of the emigrant in Cuba, where sensual enjoyments were within reach without as much moral pressure of what people would say as in the homeland, since grooming was a very common practice.34 An example of this is the letter in verse that in 1877 a man from La Palma wrote from the Santa Rosalía sugar mill, Güira de Macuriges, to a relative in La Palma, in which, as a farewell, he put his teeth long, since a girl named Aurora was waiting for him in bed and "without delay / I'm going to join her".35 These habits of freedom would mark the personality of some when they returned home. In a typical remembrance that any time in the past was better, a columnist disguised as an elderly Uncle José, regarding the recent arrival of a group of Indians in Santa Cruz de La Palma, referred in the Diario de Avisos of 1924 how the Indians of today were far from those who, in the middle of the eighteenth century, they received a multitudinous welcome and whose first concern was to visit the Virgin of Las Nieves in her sanctuary; Instead, he said, the current ones returned demoralized, "those ladinos jump up with their gold teeth and go to get their hair, to talk to the young women, instead of going to see the Virgin..."36 In the absence of concrete percentage data, we must think a priori only of a minority of the returnees. A case of this nature is that of Víctor Méndez Moreno, a palm pigeon born in Pinar del Río (Cuba), who in April 1911, at the age of 21, came to La Palma to recover his health, settling with his aunt in Breña Baja. In February 1912 he was arrested by the Civil Guard accused of kidnapping and statutory rape of Salomé Lorenzo Díaz, 16 years old, a resident of Las Ledas (Breña Baja). Although he had another formal girlfriend in town, he was accused of falling in love with and kidnapping Salomé, taking her to Santa Cruz de La Palma with the promise of embarking for Cuba, buying her some gifts, spending the night with her in an inn in the city and abandoning her the next day. She returned to her father's house and her father denounced the young Méndez. Interviewed in prison for Diario de La Palma, he said that the girl was ill-treated by her father, that she asked him for help to escape from him and for that reason he took her to the city; the prisoner considered himself seduced by the young woman's amorous demands: "And... here I am suffering the consequences of a happy night".37 Second, the fascination that the mannered and decisive Indiano aroused upon his return to his homeland, especially among the female sex, fed by a haughty and dismissive attitude of some towards everything native in the face of the alleged greatness of America; 38 an attitude that bothered the island's ruling class, according to Gregorio Cabrera Déniz.39 We see it in some handwritten verses dedicated to the "new Indiano", dated March 1901 in Barlovento, whose authorship we do not know for the moment: What an arrogant continent! What a pretentious talent! They have some Indians who return to their village. Those who in Cuba have treated nothing but peasants and blacks imagine the wretched who have left a school. Their parents, usually rough men with no talent, when they see them arrive so handsome, decisive and haughty, look at them as an oracle that comes to enlighten the people. [...] Fortunately, there are very few fools and fools, because we know many of them who are very well bred and attentive and who respect the customs and beliefs of their people and know that they go to Cuba only to earn money.40 Third, the deficit of men characteristic of a society of strong male emigration like the palm tree of those times. and, therefore, as Vicente M. Zapata points out, with a demographic structure in which the percentage of single and/or homeless women was high.41 In Breña Alta, to cite an island municipality, single women and widows with or without children, and those married to husbands absent in America, constituted 23% of Breñusco households in 1885.42 Fourth, A surprising factor and example of the well-known Braudelian aphorism about mentalities as long-term prisons, the survival of the word of marriage in the insular countryside as an effective persuasive strategy of the seducer even in the 1920s, since by the Pragmatic Sanction of 1776 he had lost his sense of customary obligation to fulfill such a commitment.43 As will be seen below, The insular press was always sympathetic and benevolent towards the young women who avenged their honor, in accordance with the general feeling of public opinion, which, with the dominant morality of the old regime still surviving, was sympathetic to the drastic ways of washing away affronts.44 This cocktail of ingredients provoked several homicides of a passionate nature marked by the participation of the seductive Indian. Thus, on July 5, 1911, a popular jury sentenced Pedro García Hernández to 20 years in prison and 5,000 pesetas in compensation for the murder of his sister-in-law Juana Sosa Lorenzo, a resident of El Paso. The defense attorney, José Nieto Méndez, said at the trial that the defendant's fate had been harmed by "some sheets of paper that a blind man distributed with some couplets that greatly inflated the facts" (see Documentary Appendix). In fact, although these sheets, published in the capital's Gutemberg printing press, largely collected the real events, the portrait of the protagonists was clearly Manichean: the murderer was painted as a lascivious and vengeful monster who had just arrived from Havana; the victim as an honest wife and mother, suffering and helpless, whose husband was absent in Cuba. In the same vein, the press also pointed out the rumor that the young murderer had imitated a similar event – in kinship and procedure – that occurred in Cuba, showing a clipping from a Havana newspaper alluding to the events a few days before perpetrating his crime. The defendant's statement provides some information not included in the string sheet or in the newspapers: that his sister-in-law insinuated herself to him but never allowed him to possess her; that he ridiculed him because of his leg amputated by scrofulism, the reason for his forced return to La Palma; that the deceased owed him money and that she had not premeditated her death, but that the fatal outcome came in the heat of the struggle.45 Item more; "A graceful young woman fires a revolver at the mocker of her honor and kills him," was the headline of the newspaper El Tiempo about the crime that took place in Puntallana on December 22, 1930. She was Paulina Perez Cabrera, 17; Juan Molina Reyes (a) El Camachero, 40, described by the newspaper as "one of those rural conquistadors who abound so many in our towns, who take advantage of the naivety of peasant women." El Camachero had been in Cuba for many years and, back in the town of Puntallana, he had characterized himself as a tireless seducer despite being married, being vox populi that he had children with four or five women, whom he had managed to cajole "with his tongue and cunning of a courtier by trade." Widowed for two years, he had made Paulina his mistress for the past eight months, using the gimmicky ruse of handing her a loaded largecaliber revolver to kill him if he broke his word to marry her. When the young woman learned that El Camachero was at the same time having intimate relations with another girl from the village whom she had taken from her parents' house with the promise of marriage, she broke up with him; who, however, did not stop harassing her to return to the previous situation, in such a way that when they were both in a lonely place next to the mountain of Tenagua, and he attacked her verbally and tried to force him, she took out the revolver of the promise and shot him mortally.46 A few months earlier, a different outcome had taken place in another case with similar characteristics: the seduction, pregnancy and abandonment of a girl from Breña Alta, Blanca Martín Pérez, a 20-year-old single woman. Instead of reacting against the seducer, he opted for suicide and threw himself into a pond, leaving a farewell letter on the wall. An article in Diario de Avisos, in addition to judging the suicide with the typical clerical anathema, spoke of the "suicidal atmosphere" that was gradually spreading in La Palma, "transported by those who go to America and come from America, either inoculating it in poor young people with their conquests, which are not conquests but villainies; or by the neurasthenia that has taken over their natures, acquired by ambitious excesses or lust".47 There is the Durkheimian theory of anomic suicide, that is, suicide rates – and crime rates – increase significantly in periods of economic depression, because the system in crisis ceases to be a moral and harmonious regulator external to the individual.48 In the absence of empirical data on the supposed increase in suicides in the United States, there is a lack of empirical data on the supposed increase in suicides in the United States. La Isla, what was the writer referring to? Perhaps to the conjuncture of those years, characterized by the end of the Cuban dream and the return of not a few emigrants marked by the stigma of failure and frustration.